GROWING PAINS

Reviewed by Helen Dudar, author and criticCHICAGO TRIBUNE

How I Grew

By Mary McCarthy

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 278

pages, $16.95

Because she is a feisty and still-productive 74 years of age, because she has given us more than four decades of enlightenment and entertainment and because she is a distinguished woman of letters, it is painful to report that Mary McCarthy`s new book is, in large part, tiresome.

''How I Grew'' is the intellectual and emotional odyssey of McCarthy`s early years--a leisurely ramble around the books, teachers, family, friends and encounters that shaped her. It is also a book about remembering. In theory, that is an interesting idea; in execution, it is a surprisingly ungainly quest for wayward details that, in the glare of the noonday sun, often turn out to be fraught with insignificance.

Journeying with McCarthy from her 7th year, when she was orphaned by a flu epidemic in 1918, to just after her Vassar graduation when she entered into a loveless marriage with an obscure actor-playwright, we are flooded with immemorable information: the high school football star she had a crush on; her first evening dress (''yellow chiffon, with a round neck''); a schoolgirl success reciting ''The Fall of the House of Usher,'' an event of such resonance that we hear of it twice; the best eastward train route from her Seattle home; her regrets over the lack of Virgil in her high school studies; the favorite baseball team of the intellectuals of her day (the New York Giants).

''Hold on!'' she exhorts us as a new shard of trivia turns up unbidden in her head. ''But wait!'' she commands another time. Almost at the beginning, she sets the tone and style by announcing the obvious: ''But I am digressing in the middle of a digression . . . .'' It is hard to know whether these pauses are improvised or whether they are a mournfully unsuccessful effort to create the illusion of the writer meandering down memory lane.

In New York last fall, I heard McCarthy read a fragment of her memoir, and during the question period that followed, a woman in the audience wistfully asked if we could expect any new fiction from her hand. McCarthy said that ''Cannibals and Missionaries'' was her final work of fiction, explaining, regrettably without amplification, ''I have a theory that you really can`t write novels after you`re 60.'' Making my way through ''How I Grew,'' I found myself thinking that many of the little stories lying inert on its pages were raw material waiting to receive the breath of life through the novelist`s art of invention. Indeed, once in a while, we find McCarthy reciting an incident and then telling us she used it in, for example, ''The Group.''

I cannot be the only early reader who returned to ''Memories of a Catholic Girlhood,'' first written from 1946 to 1957 and covering some of the same ground, to learn whether memory had betrayed me. It had not. The prose has a grace and supple discipline generally missing from McCarthy`s 19th book. Still, this is Mary McCarthy and she will sometimes repay patient reading by a gorgeous outrageousness or an interesting surprise. Delivering an opinion, McCarthy doesn`t get bogged down in qualifying adjectives. I was especially taken with her dictum--by way of explaining the teaching problems at an upper-class boarding school--that ''There is a universal law requiring

(truly) that 99 percent of the rich be retarded culturally.''

One swift sentence is the best chapter opener I have encountered for some time: ''In my first year at Annie Wright Seminary, I lost my virginity.'' She was 14 and disappointed. She then goes on to describe an unlooked-for benefit of early and unsatisfactory sex. It stifled her curiosity about the whole business, thus freeing her to think about matters probably more useful to the development of an American intellectual.

EXCERPT

The center of my life, though, during that second term in Annie Wright`s new buildings, gabled, dormered, casemented, and beginning to be creeper-covered, with a cloister to walk in on rainy days, which had a camellia tree blooming beside it, was not a man or boy but Mary Ann Lamping, a senior. Every night after study hall I sat in her room till bedtime with the rest of her clientele, doing my best to amuse that fair-haired, dry-spoken engaged girl, who came from a ''social'' family in Seattle (her father`s name was Roland), wore a black riding-habit with stock and bowler hat, was not going to the U after graduation but heading instead for a big wedding with ushers, and already had a ''settled'' air about her that was part of her allure. An absence of drive was part of it, too: her clipped, dark-blond hair was untouched by marcel iron or water wave; she had indolent, slightly broad hips and elegant tapering legs, never crossed, never folded under her, never wound around a chair leg, but squarely held apart, giving her the lap of a young matron as she sat in her armchair idly buffing her nails.